Reputation for sale, Part One

Lisa Bloom is one of those power attorneys who manages to make here way into the news with some regularity. Like her even more in-the-public-eye mother, Gloria Allred, Bloom is regarded – or was – as a feminist, often defending the rights of victims of sexual harassment and/or assault. She was instrumental in getting Bill O’Reilly ousted from Fox. More recently, she’s been high profiling by representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

And now it’s been chronicled in a new book She Said, which details the New York Times’s exposé of ultra-predator Harvey Weinstein that Bloom is also capable of playing for the other side. It’s alleged that she not just stood up for Weinstein, but that she was willing to do so by speaking out against the women who were accusing Weinstein. Oh.

Six months before the Times began its investigation into Weinstein, Lisa Bloom, a civil rights attorney known for representing female assault victims and the daughter of famed feminist lawyer Gloria Allred, wedged herself in the producer’s corner. Her role, she proposed in a startling private memo, would be to use her insider knowledge of victimology to attack Weinstein’s victims.

Regarding Rose McGowan, an early accuser, Bloom told Weinstein, “I feel equipped to help you against the Roses of the world, because I have represented so many of them.” She suggested a “counterops online campaign to push back and call her out as a pathological liar.” She educated Weinstein on “reputation management,” and encouraged him to stage preemptive television interviews, wherein he would invoke his deceased mother and claim that her passing had caused him to “evolve” on women’s issues. (Source: WaPo)

Wow.

Weinstein evolved on women’s issues, alright.

Why put your carefully crafted reputation at risk? That oldest of motivations: money, honey. Bloom was looking for a hefty retainer.

In writing about Bloom, WaPo columnist Monica Hesse weaves in the Aunts from The Handmaid’s Tale, the women who policed the state the young, fertile women existed in.

Margaret Atwood has a just out sequel, The Testaments, which I haven’t yet read. Don’t know when I’ll have the heart to read it, but Hesse has done so, and deftly explores the Aunt Lydia-ness of Lisa Bloom.

Eerily The Testaments even has a character who :

…had previously been employed as a judge and an advocate for women. Her opposition to the new regime lasts only a few weeks into her own mistreatment, at which point she’s approached by an official with a job proposal: She can use her prior feminist experience to help manipulate women in the new world order.

Doing so means jettisoning everything she’s ever fought for, but it comes with a heck of a benefits package: power, security and becoming one of the few women still legally allowed to read.

Hesse goes on to point out that Bloom’s advice to Weinstein is pretty garden variety. Not anything that any other “crisis manager” wouldn’t have come up with. That’s how it goes.

It’s that Bloom was willing to sell-out the women she has represented – and, in the case of the women who were abused by Jeffrey Epstein, continues to represent – by using her “insider information” on what makes victims tick to undermine those who were Weinstein’s victims. And given her experience, she did so fully in the know about what “would happen to Weinstein’s victims if [Weinstein’s attorneys] executed [Bloom’s] plan.”

Bloom has apologized, and “has vowed to make her law practice 100 percent victim-focused.”

I never agreed with the sappy Love Story bit that went “love means never having to say you’re sorry.” I thought that was BS when I first heard it fifty years ago, and I haven’t changed my opinion at all.

Sometimes you really do have to issue an apology. Easy enough to do. But sometimes it takes more than sorry to get forgiven. Let’s see if Bloom can pull it off.

In addition to a hefty retainer, Lisa Bloom was apparently looking for Weinstein to help her out with a movie project.

Oh. Wow.

Seems like when Bloom looked at the words “Me, Too” she focused a bit to hard on the “me.”

I’m sure that Lisa Bloom will bounce back from all this. As we’ve seen time and again, Fitzgerald was wrong about there being no second acts in American life.

I wouldn’t be surprised if she even gets that movie deal. (Of course, it probably won’t be with Weinstein. His second act may be long in coming.)

Meanwhile, if I were one of Lisa Bloom’s clients, I’d be thinking twice about moving forward with her.